Nursery Progress

The nursery has been a work in progress for the past nine months, but we're finally done! Before I show you the finished product, I'd like to show you how it came to be...

I missed getting a picture of what the guest bedroom looked like before, but here it is pretty close to the beginning. We were very fortunate to receive a crib free from a friend of a friend! Another friend also gave us the adorable bassinet.

As par for the course we had problems with our wall.  A rat decided to join the family by climbing up the drain pipe to the guest bathroom sink and chewing a hole in it so it could live in our wall.  Teddy knew it was in there so he busted a hole in the wall to say hello.  This meant we had to do some fixing before we could get to painting.  And of course say farewell (catch and release) our little rat friend.

The next thing we did was paint one wall blue.  We chose to use the same blue that we used in our living room for three reasons: 1. We already had it = free!  2. We knew we liked it.  3. It looks great when you're looking down the hall from the living room.

After the walls were repaired we moved the guest bed to this side of the room so that we could continue having a place for guests to stay.

Then came the real fun, painting our woodland mural on the wall.  I put together a Pinterest board and in the end decided this picture best represented the type of trees I wanted.  Ben took it and sketched out how it would look with our wall, and crib placement.

With our plan in place he started by cutting wavy lines on painters tape to help shape the outline of the trees.

Lookin good Ben!

No matter where I am, Lucy is always nearby supervising.

Back to the walls...  After cutting the wavy lines Ben attached them to the wall where we wanted the trees to be.

I shared this on Facebook and everyone thought we were putting up bamboo!

  Next came the knotholes.  Ben free-handed these in the painters tape.

They already looked good on the walls!

I wanted the trees to look like birch trees so we cut little slivers out of the painter's tape.

I was the cutter and Ben was the placer.

Then came the exciting part, PAINT!

Womp womp, Frog Tape Fail!!!!

That blue was not supposed to come up!  We painted it a week prior to doing the trees!

I told Ben I wanted to splurge on the good tape so we wouldn't have any bleeding problems. Well so much for that! It took hours to touch up all the spots where the white bled. Tip for future, someone told us that if you paint the underneath color on top of the painter's tape you won't get bleeding. Gotta remember that for next time!

Anybody recognize this squirrel?  I'll give you a hint, I decorated another room with him two years ago...

Answer: He's from my classroom!  We used the creatures Ben created for my classroom as templates! We traced them out on the wall and then painted them with a primer coating of white.

My super tallented guy free-handed all those branches, no painter's tape!

Then he made a template for the a single leaf and traced it all over the room.  Painting some in white and some in a blue/grey paint he mixed using the blue and white paints together.

At the last second I decided I wanted a bird's nest, so I printed one off from the internet and showed Ben where I wanted it.

During this time we ordered the dresser that will function as a changing table. Unfortunately it arrived damaged.

So we had to wait while they picked it up and sent us a new one...

In the meantime progress continued on the woodland creatures, Ben used craft store acrylic paint to paint all the creatures in shades of pink and purple.

Lucy would like to know who you think is cuter, her or the fox?  (I highly recommend you say her...)

Here's the story, of a lovely nursery...

It's the Brady Bunch of woodland creatures!

Next time I'll show you the whole nursery all done!